A while back we had been watching a movie one night, when we finished watching it and turned off the TV we heard a cat meowing.
Thinking one of our cats had gotten outside I opened the door and went out. At the end of the deck was a cat, but not one of ours. She looked to be part calico, part tiger – very unusual markings.
She meowed, and kept a distance from me but kept rubbing against the edge of the deck and looking pretty friendly. After some coaxing I finally was able to get her to come over to me.
She was such a nice, friendly and clean cat we couldn’t just leave her out there. We brought her food and water, and moist food. All of which she ate while dividing her time between the food and rubbing against us.
Well, we let her come inside, and she seemed to fit in quite well. She was a very affectionate cat, and even slept with us and sat on my lap the first morning she was there.
But her belly seemed kinda round, I discounted it at first – that she might be pregnant. But her belly kept growing and growing until we couldn’t say “she’s getting fat!” any more.
So we resigned ourselves to the fact that we’d have a bunch of kittens to find homes for.
She kept getting larger, and larger, and larger. We put together a nice bed in a box for her but she kept exploring every nook and cranny of the house. One place she checked out a couple of times was the corner of our home-office, in a space behind a filing cabinet and paper shredder and behind Jenny’s computer. I told Jenny that the mother cat (who we named Janeway – all our pets are named after Star Trek characters) would likely just have them where she felt like having them, no matter how nice we made a place for her to do so.
Janeway kept getting bigger and we kept anticipating the birth, and then we started getting a bit worried. She looked like she was going to have about ten kittens, and I couldn’t remember how big our cats in the barn used to get. Was her size normal? Was there something wrong? Or were they just going to come out half-grown? 😉
She stayed; for the most part, in our master bedroom’s bathroom stretched out on the cool tiles. One night I woke up and checked on her, but she wasn’t there. I looked around the house, not finding her anywhere.
Finally I looked in the space behind Jenny’s computer. Sure enough, that’s where she had two of her kittens. There was blood and other things there, unmentionable things.
So at 3 in the morning we carefully transferred her and her kittens to the box we had set up, took it into the bathroom near our bedroom, and I proceeded to clean some things out and set up the steam cleaner.
After spending quite a bit of time hand-scrubbing the blood and such, and then using the hand attachment on the steam cleaner (the whole thing wouldn’t fit in there) I had the blood cleaned up.
We went back to bed, worrying a bit as she seemed to have stopped her contractions and she obviously had a few (or more) to pop out yet.
I think we both checked on her a few times but she still hadn’t had any more.
But the next morning she’d had two more and that seemed to be it. Two little orange and whites and two little half-calico’s/half-whites. The latter being females, and the former being males.
Over the next few days she managed to carry the lot of them off into various places around the house a couple of times. I also intercepted her in the process of carrying the babies quite a number of times. But finally she seems to have given up and is leaving them where they are.